Farley Granger: Senso and Sensibility

In four films, two for Alfred Hitchcock (Rope {1948} and Strangers on a Train {1951}), one for Nicholas Ray (They Live by Night {1948}) and one for Luchino Visconti (Senso {1954}), Farley Granger undercut his sexy good looks and puppy-ish charm with undercurrents of dark moral fecklessness; you could hear his doubts and unsavory desires in his strained, clotted voice. And when you looked closely at his appearance, the extreme things that made him a renowned male beauty, like his thick lips and long, crooked nose, seemed to signal his outsider quality. There was something distinctly unwholesome about Granger, a fact that never occurred to his employer and jailer, Samuel Goldwyn, who kept him chained to a long-term contract and put him in stuffy, hopeless films like Our Very Own (1950) and I Want You (1951). When Granger was freed of Goldwyn in the mid-fifties, he went into the theater and live television, then to Italian giallos with titles like Hot Bed of Sex and So Naked, So Dead (1972), and finally to daytime soap operas like One Life to Live and As the World Turns.

With the help of his long-time partner Robert Calhoun, Granger has written a memoir, Include Me Out. The title is a Sam Goldwyn malapropism, and it also heralds Granger stepping at least part way out of the closet. Arthur Laurents wrote about his affair with Granger in his own memoir, and Granger covers some of the same ground Laurents does, but with markedly less detail. Laurents has sharp words for practically all of Hollywood, but for Granger he still has a soft spot: “Uncomplicated, he was easier to love…once you knew him, what you marveled at was his sweetness.” Later, though, Laurents notes ominously, “It took me a long time to realize that where Farley was really a good actor was off-screen.” Granger is still apparently miffed that Laurents wrote about their relationship, and says that Laurents’ ego has gotten bigger with time. “Perhaps that’s because he has never been considered one of our best playwrights,” Granger observes, inserting his Hitchcock knife.

An only child, Granger was the hope and meal ticket of his alcoholic parents. He got discovered young, and made two war films for Lewis Milestone, The North Star (1943) and The Purple Heart (1944) before going to war himself. At 21, he lost his virginity “twice in one night,” the first time to a patient Hawaiian girl prostitute, the second time to a manly older officer. Granger professes that he was undisturbed by this double-gating, and proclaims himself bisexual. To prove it, he describes a brief affair with Ava Gardner, a one-night stand with Barbara Stanwyck, and a publicity bonanza with Shelley Winters, who he dubs “the love of my life, and the bane of my existence.” In one of the book’s funniest scenes, he discovers Shelley in her dressing room blasting Puccini and stuffing herself with jelly donuts.

To keep the score even, he notes that Leonard Bernstein was “as passionate and enthusiastic a lover as he was a conductor,” and tells how Visconti set him up with Jean Marais, Granger also turns down a direct Noel Coward. He goes on about Ethel Merman and Judy Garland, and is prone to high bitch remarks like, “I’d hesitate to call Robert Stack dumb, but he had no sense of humor.” We aren’t told too much about “Bob,” the memoir’s co-author, who Granger meets in the early sixties and spends the rest of his life with. If we define sexuality by who we have sex with, then I suppose Granger could be called bisexual, at least when he was younger. But who of either sex wouldn’t sleep with Ava Gardner? He says she “moved like a panther and laughed like a man.” Exactly. It’s clear that Granger wants to keep at least a smidgen of heterosexual cachet, and he doesn’t want to disappoint his still-rabid old lady fans, like this gal on IMDB, who, having heard of Granger’s memoir and his professed bisexuality, writes, “This makes me happy, as I am a woman and think that he was absolutely scrumptious in his youth. Plus, from watching him in Strangers on a Train, he didn’t seem gay to me…”

Include Me Out goes into great detail about the long shooting of Visconti’s Senso, which is the film Granger is most proud of. In the world’s tightest pair of white army pants, Granger at last reveals the villain who had been lurking behind his male ingenue roles for Goldwyn. At the other end of the spectrum, in Ray’s They Live By Night, Granger is probably the softest, most vulnerable male presence in a movie until River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho (1992). And in between those peaks, Hitchcock made the fullest use of him. In Rope, Granger is a hysteric, a doormat, an abused wife. It is remarkable how unattractive he makes himself for the Master, both in Rope and in Strangers on a Train, where his weak-willed tennis pro is one of Hitch’s most unappealing heroes (Granger also makes a special contribution to that film with his sly, cruisey smiles in the first scene, so that Guy Haines seems like an opportunistic double-gater with a preference for men much like the actor himself).

Granger’s book has an unusual amount of references to meals he remembers, recalled in sensuous detail (his lunch menu with Bernstein: “consummé madrilenè, cold chicken, hot new potato salad, gorgonzola and pears all washed down with a cool white Bordeaux.”) This reveals a boy and man who lived for the moment, for both simple and complex pleasures, and that attitude hurt him in the long run. He turned down a bad Darryl Zanuck production, The Egyptian (1954), and later learned that he was blacklisted by both Goldwyn and Zanuck, which is why he never made another top-flight film after Senso. He weathered failures in the theater, but eventually won acclaim in Deathtrap and Lanford Wilson’s Talley and Son, which won Granger an OBIE (he chooses to close his memoir with this win). Include Me Out is, in most respects, a disarmingly honest book that catches its subject’s personality. It will serve as one of the final accounts of what Granger calls “the best of the last of the Golden Age” in Hollywood.

Dan Callahan is a film writer based in New York. He's the former Arts Editor of Show Business Weekly and Book Editor at Culturedose.net. He has written for Slant Magazine, Time Out New York, and Senses of Cinema.